Effective operation of any business, corporation and/or Government agency, requires an accurate means of recording employee's attendance and hours worked so that an effective payroll system may be maintained. This, of course, is in addition to the use of such records to determine vacation schedules, efficiency and productivity studies and use in other ways in corporate management and operation.
The maintenance of such records usually involve the employee punching a time slip into a time clock upon entering and leaving the working establishment. These time slips would in turn be used by a timekeeper to determine the attendance and hours worked. While such an arrangement may be effectively utilized in a small business, in a large corporation or Government agency, i.e., such as the Post Office, the use of manual time cards involves numerous procedures for handling, which are often complex and lead to mistakes by timekeepers, aside from the time lost due to constant monitoring, auditing and management attention to insure procedures are being followed. Often times, employees are shifted on a temporary basis to understaff locations or departments and then shifted back, which is somewhat disrupting to a centralized system. In addition, monitoring and/or regulating overtime is somewhat at a disadvantage since manual record keeping is not usually capable of being maintained on an instantaneous basis.
For example, the U.S. Post Office has approximately 645,000 employees working at 31,000 installations and is subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act which requires great accuracy in attendance and time records. Recognizing the inefficiencies of the manual time cards, the Post Office is presently attempting to fully automate their system in this regard. Partial automatization has been accomplished by way of the Postal Source Data System, described in Fiscal Handbook F22 published by the U.S. Postal Service with information of some employees being fed directly into on-line data centers. The remaining employees still utilize manual time cards, with manual procedures as described in Fiscal Handbook F21 published by the U.S. Postal Service.
Their present arrangement of partial automatization has numerous shortcomings aside from the fact that the cost of automatic timekeeping functions has fallen off and now substantially less than manual. The continued use of time cards result in two-fold increase in the data requirements for payroll calculations at the data centers. As a result, there has been a substantial increase in effort required for keypunching, editing, error corrections, time card preparation and time card dispatching at the centers. This additional time and attendance processing is wasteful and usually reduces the amount of time available to produce checks and jeopardizes the ability of the data centers to make timely distribution of checks to the various installations.
Accordingly, there is exists a need for an automatic time and attendance system which is practical, efficient and reduces the clerical costs, while providing a constant monitoring of employee hours including overtime, vacation and sick leave etc. A system which will allow for monitoring loaned employee hours. A system which does not require the use of expensive interfacing between each office or installation and a central data processing center and one which will allow the timekeeper to access the time and attendance records instantly at each location for record keeping purposes while allowing the timekeeper to adjust for corrections as necessary.